View west, up NE 8th from the air, at about Bellevue Way, 1967. (23/96)
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Ferris wheel in the background!
This is pretty cool to see
Imagine buying a sizable piece of land in that area back in the 60’s… wow
Long before the 1960s, the Freeman family owned all the land around there. The grandfather of Bellevue Square’s current owner was viciously racist against the Japanese who previously owned the land, and got them shipped off to concentration camps so that he could buy it cheaply:
Mr. Kemper Freeman Jr. comes from Bellevue, Washington, where he has lived for three generations. His grandfather, Miller Freeman, was active in state politics and public affairs, including promoting the development of a bridge connecting Seattle, Mercer Island, and Bellevue, and acting as a driving force in anti-Japanese discrimination, advocating a “white man’s Pacific coast”. Miller Freeman began calling for the segregation and deportation of Japanese immigrants in 1907, seeing them as a threat to white prosperity. An advocate of the state’s 1921 alien land laws, the 1924 Immigration Act, and the 1942 incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps during World War II, he founded the Anti-Japanese League of Washington in 1916.
After the Japanese were rounded up and carted away in 1944, Kemper Freeman Sr. and Miller Freeman started buying up all the land. – Native Americans were originally taken from the land in treaties that were almost immediately broken.
Damn… that’s messed up
It was reported a few years ago that an art exhibit at Bellevue College was censored to keep people from learning about the Freeman family’s dirty history. People need to know that they became billionaires through exploitation of minorities.
If you go into the Kids Museum, upstairs they have early Bellevue elementary school pictures on the wall, half the kids were Japanese.